No! I am not prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord . . .
But that’s not who I am. I don’t even have the guts to apply for the position of a courtier to the mercurial prince of Denmark.
In 1917, T.S. Eliot rightly understood that Prince Hamlet had been forever exiled. Eliot had correctly diagnosed his time; he even gave it a name: J. Alfred Prufrock. Bent with the cares of age, pondering his own wake, he is weary. He sees himself easily, wearing white flannel trousers with bottoms rolled and walking along the beach. His hair brushed back. A dyspeptic, he is nervous about eating his favorite fruit. He has heard that mermaids sing their songs to each other, but he doesn’t think they will ever sing for him.
Witnessing the broken form of the very “self” of the Renaissance who had risen and shattered the skies with demands and desires and fears and promises, the wise poet in the twentieth century felt very melancholy. Melancholia does not suit everyone; one must be consequential to experience it; people like me can, at most, be sad. But today, at the end of the century, in paupered Bangladesh, a babbling scribbler does not have what it takes to grieve; he cannot even fathom how to acquaint a few others with his own time.
My time isn’t too short a spell. The entire period during which one works technically falls within one’s time. Everything from the first wail to the last breath lies within its limits. Can even the last attempts of the dying to stare at the ceiling with their rolling eyeballs be considered an effortless act? For as long as I live, I will consider everything mine.
Even after living for so long I still can’t understand: how should I diagnose this era? What are the characteristics that make it recognizable? Light, dark, white, black, red, blue, khaki, green, bright, dull—which among these many faces is real? Which is right?
Then let me begin at the beginning. I was born in the famine. During the famine of 1943, when millions of people were simply picked off by hunger, I slid out of my mother’s belly and seized someone’s place in the world. The Second World War had begun four years before; had I been a luminary, it would have ended at the very moment of my birth. No, there was no such sign. The war raged undeterred. The country was agitating for freedom from foreign rule; just four years after my birth, independence finally arrived. And who came with her? Riot. The immense human multitude that fearlessly fought for freedom soon divided itself into two factions that promptly snapped each other’s necks. Are these two events the same? Which one should I use to signify my time?
Independence came, and a million people lost their homes. What should I prioritize? Did the man who died at the hands of his friend find his own life less valuable than the independence of the nation? That the independence had not brought freedom with it was obvious before long. Shall I consider humanity’s despair its greatest truth? Meanwhile, before long, a terrible revolution reared its head. I was in fifth grade, but I understood from the extent of popular unrest that the people of the land were about to stand unified in resistance. The shock had struck the foundations of the new state, forming a crack that eventually turned into a major fault line.
As soon as the “Language Movement” was won, leaders began fighting amongst themselves. The pettiness of the great leaders made it difficult to believe that these were the very men who had inspired the people to storm the ramparts of oppression. Their infighting became the excuse for military rule. From the time I entered college, about to leave my adolescence behind, I fell into the clutches of the army, and there my entire life has been spent; I have not been able to free myself from its grasp. Squashed under the juggernaut of martial law, the boy who became a youth, the youth who is now a greying old man—can he be expected to turn out the same as citizens of any other country? His sorrow, his shame, his failings, his helplessness, his discontent—are these the markers of my time?
The stone-squashed multitude reared its head again simply to stay alive. In 1962, a revolutionary movement gained ground, when we were serious young men. Every single day the revolution swelled in size. And what does this swelling tide decide to do? Takes upon itself the task of canvassing for the 1964 presidential elections. The extent to which martial law had crippled the people was evident in the fact that this massive unrest was unable to settle upon any agenda except getting rid of Ayub Khan. But Ayub Khan stuck on. Guns had power, and the elections helped allied factions to develop in the villages—the new elites who called themselves Basic Democrats. Ayub Khan’s state spread out into the remotest of towns and villages, thievery and corruption reached the very crevices of the nation. If I am to consider state repression the greatest emblem of that time, then how do I locate the rebellion of 1969?
For the first time in my life, I saw a revolution where a multitudinous human majority marched forward risking their lives in such a way that not just the nation but the very structure of social oppression was damaged by it. Those who had been indulging in oppression for ages were finally identified as the real oppressors. Nobody was concerned about whether they were Bengali or Punjabi, Bihari or Hindu. Will this revolution mark the distinctness of my time? Shall I then leave out those who clipped the wings of this massive unrest in order to use it to stoke the nationalist fervor of the middle class? Those very individuals whom the people rescued by gheraoing cantonments and washing away curfews with their own blood assisted in dampening the revolution the moment they were freed—this happened in my time too. My time is painted with the liberation war of 1971. I’ve been screaming “the moon and star, the green and white flag” at the top of my lungs since the age of four, and that very flag was knotted to hang multitudes.
Then independence came again. Time for independence number two.
And who accompanied her? Liberation? No—a new troupe came in with sticks and stones. Brandishing flagstaffs, the new rulers used them as rods to beat the already battered populace. Whacked their heads, kicked their bellies. Famine again. This time my son was born. His birth witnessed millions dying from starvation. At the same time, the king’s daughter was being married, with a golden crown on her head. Which was real—independence, or famine, or the golden crown of the royal marriage?
Once more the rod changed hands. Oh rod, to whom do you belong? To whomever controls me. Now the rod was controlled by professional thugs. Their master lived abroad, across the sea, across the mountains. Egged on by their master, the gangs pounced upon the people who had no food on their plates, no clothes on their backs, no weapons in their hands. The hooligans arrived in waves with machine guns, Sten guns and tanks. Barking viciously, they attacked the common people until they became tired of killing thousands, at which point their master whistled at them and commanded via remote control: it’s time to drop some democracy. Then the hooligans sat on top of tanks and doled it out. It was certainly effective. So many big leaders revealed their true colors.
The very men who transformed the structure of society in my youth, whose clarion calls I believed held superhuman power, now sold every inch of their bodies from head to toe to these gangs for power or wealth. The very tongues that once blazed like fire now wagged like scalped tails at the praises of their master. What can be said of them? It’s certainly true that once upon a time some of them had honestly pledged their allegiance to the revolution for people’s liberation. Today they are lumpen looters. Which of their faces will be upheld by my time?
Which is truer: the fact that the entire nation had banded together to seize independence from the hands of medieval cannibals? That, or the ostentatious plans of political power of those self-same blind bigots who sacrificed their own mothers and sisters and wives to the desires of man-eating monsters? Which one?
In the time that refuses to reveal to me its distinctness, what power do I have to gain distinction? I am wheezing, helpless, walled within my time. It’s hard to live like this. That’s why—not for any great cause—just for survival, I try to balance on the tips of my toes and look over the wall. What’s on that side? Beyond my lifetime—immense, endless time. I try to see as much as I can with my +2- and -3-powered, bifocal, bespectacled eyes. My heart trembles as I watch. Oh no, there I am too! All the gigantic past that I can see is suffused by me. As I keep looking, I soon reach that ancient time, maybe even its other side, when, on the enormous surface of the oceans as a little bubble of life, I float. Then I see myself, with so many other people—yes, this scared and miserable self, obsessed with grasping a piece of land to clamber ashore. Finally, I arrive on the shore too. Then, attacked by so many creatures, attacking so many more, rain-washed, sunburnt, I cross so many paths and end up here in the present. Even now, some giant brute is trying to sit on my chest like a stone. A poet of similar age murmurs feverishly:
All night this hand (a rat, mainly)
With its two heavy legs stands on my chest
Steady, unmoving—
Hearing his words, I know I’m not alone. But the creature’s tyranny keeps growing. It won’t give me a chance to look over the wall of my time. At first, I shake myself to escape from its clutches. I call him names, son of a bitch, son of a pig. The son of a pig won’t go away. And here I am, perishing. That’s why I want to resist him with all my strength. Trying to push it off with my two hands, I realize that it’s not as large a creature as I’d imagined. No. It’s not an elephant. Like Rafiq Azad, I had mistaken it for an elephant. It’s not even a pig or a piglet. A ratlike being, the lowly creature “nibbles sharply and struts with pride.”
The rat has crossed all limits. Thus, the urge to finish it off is strengthening. Whether or not I can squash it, I must give it all I have. Who knows? Maybe in the future, my shattered, crippled, and diseased time will be diagnosed as the moment of fighting with that ignoble creature. I live in that hope. It’s why I try to write a few words with my stammering pen!
